r/financialindependence Aug 13 '21

What do you do that you earn six figures?

It seems like a lot of people make a lot of money and it seems like I’m missing out on something. So those of you that do, whats your occupation that pays so well?

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u/allybearound Aug 13 '21

*lady, but yes lol. I typically use a dnd after hours, but our overseas devs are so slow that if I miss messages from them, they just sit with their thumb up their ass until they get an answer.

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u/r_lovelace Aug 13 '21

I've worked with my fair share of overseas devs and while this may be a bad assumption it certainly feels like they have 0 ability to grasp the bigger picture. They will follow step by step instructions without any straying at all but if at any point a small step is missing or the situation isn't exactly as described in instructions they end up stuck. This can be great if you need bodies to do menial shit that can be flow charted out but not at all helpful when you need someone to complete more ambiguous tasks or tasks that don't have some 10 page guide.

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u/allybearound Aug 13 '21

100%. I don't usually like to make generalizations like this, but this has absolutely been my experience for the past decade.

We have a remote team that just spent 3.5 months working on a new feature that was estimated at 6 weeks (max.. No one was keeping an eye on the project, and it ran way way way over.) My QA team has already created seventy five bug or "does not meet spec" jira tickets. Absolutely maddening, we're looking at cutting most of our overseas guys because the math doesn't work. If they're paid 1/2 what our in house devs are, but take 2-3x the time to complete the work, and require 5x the handholding and QA, and STILL deliver subpar work... Nah!

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u/r_lovelace 29d ago

Honestly my experience over the 7 years experience in industry I have is that overseas is best for QA. Have an inhouse QA Lead or manager that is creating the test cases and scripts and farm the work overseas to run the cases. They can handle filling out defects and tickets but actual dev work is painful and basically what you described. It takes a larger team double the time to put together code that often is missing key features or have major defects that imply no unit testing has been completed. Worst of all you can't put them in front of a customer or even an internal team to gather requirements so you still need to be heavily involved as a mediator and PM in some fashion. It's literally not worth the money. I think a lot of CIO/CTOs are recognizing this in the long run that the short term budget savings of offshore end up causing them headaches years later with major project build up and in general a shittier code base. Maybe the company I'm at now is just better at it than where I was before but the trend seems to be much more selective in offshore usage and having them plug gaps instead work on anything remotely important in isolation.